Sunday, August 9, 2015

Christopher Hitchens' "The Missionary Position": Book Review

Reading this on my Kindle, I was surprised it ended so suddenly. I
wanted more. Subsequent events since this appeared in 1995 show that
Mother Teresa is on the fast track to canonization after her 1997 death
led to her 2003 beatification. In retrospect, the furor over Christopher
Hitchens' little book reveals a more-carefully considered study of her
media impact and the finagling of her financial empire behind a sort of
calculated willful ignorance. He starts each section with apt and clever
quotations from earlier skeptics and in tying the Albanian woman to
cronies as far-flung and as dreadfully connected to filthy lucre such as
Duvaliers in Haiti, Hitchens makes the case with wit but also sorrow
that so many of us fell for this.

The money amassed by the millions, the donations to her by
Charles Keating of some of the $250+ million he gained by fraud and
deceit, and the destitution in which both the Sisters of her
Missionaries of Charity and those whom they care for are skillfully
narrated and analyzed by Hitchens. As in much of his journalism, he can
show signs of too brisk or showy a dash over territory that requires
slow navigation. The Albanian context examined late on saps the momentum
of his earlier chapters, although his interest in the Balkans surely
contributed to his decision to cover this.

His moral is simple. “The rich world likes and wishes to
believe that someone, somewhere, is doing something for the Third World.
For this reason, it does not inquire too closely into the motives or
practices of anyone who fulfills, however vicariously, this mandate.” We
shift a guilty conscience to the admittedly devoted Missionaries of her
Order, he suggests, and we let them and its idolized founder act in the
name of an apostolate that, however well intended, manipulates the poor
to score points against contraception and abortion but neglects any
critique of overpopulation. Poverty rather than fought against is
embraced. While the Sisters may accept this, their patients, Hitchens
reasons, may not.

After all, as a noted atheist, Hitchens has the advantage
of standing apart from such as Malcolm Muggeridge, a journalist
predecessor who was taken in by her glow, attributing a miracle not to
Kodak film stock but to Mother Teresa's intervention while she was alive
to illuminate an interior. Against such shenanigans. a rationalist like
Hitchens offers a counter-argument, lest the credulous trust too much
in clerical leaders like her.

“It is often said, inside the Church and out of it, that
there is something grotesque about lectures on the sexual life when
delivered by those who have shunned it. Given the way that the Church
forbids women to preach, this point is usually made about men. But given
how much this Church allows the fanatical Mother Teresa to preach, it
might be added that the call to go forth and multiply, and to take no
thought for the morrow, sounds grotesque when uttered by an elderly
virgin whose chief claim to reverence is that she ministers to the
inevitable losers in this very lottery.”

While some of this spirited polemic rushes by too rapidly,
Hitchens provides a look at what is necessary. Believers in this mission
may cringe or carp. But a service, however cattily aimed at generating
controversy from the title on, is rendered. The faithful need to heed
views of such skeptics. (8-7-15 to Amazon US.) P.S. After her planned canonization, in 2016, see Eamonn McCann in The Irish Times, and in Salon, George Gillett.

David Jones

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